Posts Tagged ‘home ownership’

I want you to first read about something that Bush said once – in an incredibly oblique reference that may not have even intended Obama and CERTAINLY did not name him – and the Obama campaign’s and the Democrat Party’s reaction to that incredibly oblique reference. And then I want to contrast that with the vile demonization that Barack Obama is using to poison the world against D0nald Trump and THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IF IT ELECTS TRUMP as he takes his campaign of hate overseas.

On May 16, 2008 the New York Times – hardly a partial, objective source friendly to Bush or to Republicans – printed this article:

JERUSALEM — President Bush used a speech to the Israeli Parliament on Thursday to denounce those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals” — a remark that was widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential contender, who has argued that the United States should talk directly with countries like Iran and Syria.

Mr. Bush did not mention Mr. Obama by name, and the White House said his remarks were not aimed at the senator, though they created a political firestorm in Washington nonetheless.

In a lengthy speech intended to promote the strong alliance between the United States and Israel, the president invoked the emotionally volatile imagery of World War II to make the case that talking to extremists was no different than appeasing Hitler and the Nazis.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The president was alluding to Senator William E. Borah, an Idaho Republican noted for his powers of oratory and his isolationist views. In 1938, when Hitler was gobbling up parts of Europe, Borah expressed admiration for him, and in 1939 he did indeed lament that he had not been able to talk to Hitler before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

The Obama campaign issued an angry response to Mr. Bush’s statement. In an e-mail statement to reporters, the senator denounced Mr. Bush for using the 60th anniversary of Israel to “launch a false political attack,” adding, “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

Other Democrats leapt to Mr. Obama’s defense, among them Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, who accused Mr. Bush of taking politics overseas.

“The tradition has always been that when a U.S. president is overseas, partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” Mr. Emanuel said in a statement. “President Bush has now taken that principle and turned it on its head.”

The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said the comment was not a reference to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush was simply reiterating his own longstanding views.

“I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you — that is not always true and it is not true in this case,” Ms. Perino told reporters here.

[…]

I read through the entire article, and found no other reference that even Bush’s harshest critiques attributed to an attack against Obama on foreign soil that the Democrats claim would be evil beyond the pale and no president worthy of the office would engage in such behavior.

Now, while I would argue that “if the damn shoe fits, put it on your demon-clawed feet and WEAR them, but otherwise shut up” applies here. Even the New York SLIMES admits that “Mr. Bush did not mention Mr. Obama by name.” And it is such an oblique mention at best it is impossible for anyone to prove that Bush actually intended Obama.

Mind you, in spite of Obama’s outright lies to the contrary, history now proves that Obama actually DID negotiate with terrorists and radicals and do every damn thing he said there was no way he would do.

So in any event, we have from the Democrat Party and from Obama an acknowledgement that any president who criticizes an opposition candidate for president while overseas is worse than a piece of roach poop.

So let us now see what our “Whatever-is-worse-than-roach-poop-in-Chief has said about Donald Trump:

May 26, 2016: Nothing stops politics this election season — not even the water’s edge.While traveling overseas on official business Thursday, President Obama couldn’t resist wading into political matters back home, sparking controversy by saying foreign leaders are “rattled” by the rise of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.Obama, saying leaders have “good reason” to feel that way, made the remarks on the sidelines of a Group of Seven economic summit in Japan.“They are rattled by it — and for good reason,” Obama said. “Because a lot of the proposals he has made display either ignorance of world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines.” […]

Obama, meanwhile, was criticized for his remarks by other Republicans, with one calling them “incredibly irresponsible” given the context.

“When the president of the United States goes overseas he’s representing the country,” Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said on Fox News. “It is remarkably irresponsible and remarkably unpresidential for him to weigh in on a domestic political battle and effectively undermine one of the candidates who could replace him next January.”

“In front of the world community and effectively in front of all the world leaders, saying someone is essentially unfit for office is an incredibly irresponsible move for the president of the United States,” Holmes said.

What Obama did was reckless and unpresidential. It was wrong – and it was wrong by Obama’s very own words. But not only did he not quit doing it, he ESCALATED his vicious and unpresidential behavior. Witness what he just did today while standing right next to the Prime Minister of Singapore addressing a supposedly overseas and international agreement (TPP):

August 2, 2016: Singapore’s prime minister visited the White House today to pitch the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal and discuss other issues, but his appearance was overshadowed by Donald Trump.Prime Minister Lee and President Obama appeared before media as part of an official state visit to Washington, D.C. by the Singaporean leader. He cited economics, security, and political stability in the Asia-Pacific region all as reasons why the United States should pass TPP as soon as possible.Lee spoke specifically about the strategic interests that the United States maintains and indirectly referenced the balancing of power that America must maintain with China. He also expressed his neutral stance on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Obama also pitched the deal but did not stay neutral on the election.

“The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,” Obama said, adding, “The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia, means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job.”

Obama was referring to Trump’s ongoing feud with Khizr Khan, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his son, a muslim and a U.S. soldier who lost his life in combat. He may also have been referring to Trump’s recent confusion over the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Many headlines coming out of the press conference focused on these comments, and not the TPP.

The ONLY individual who has now PROVEN he is “unfit to be the president” is the abject disgrace who is currently holding the damn job.

I want you to understand something, Democrat: if the American people elect Donald Trump for president, Barack Obama just personally flushed you and your entire country down the toilet. This is slash-and-burn at its WORST.

Given the way our Traitor-in-Chief just characterized what may be President Donald Trump, how would Russia and China not be within their rights to attack the United States citing Obama’s own words that Trump is unstable and a direct threat to world peace???

Barack Obama just stated, “If Donald Trump is elected, I want America wiped out in World War III.” Because that is how much that wicked fool truly despises this country. He is all but calling for every other nation to do everything it can to exploit Donald Trump, to boycott him, to weaken him, to destroy him – and the nation that elected him and the people who live here in the process.

I know that if Donald Trump is elected president and ANY nation does ANYTHING, it will be because Barack Obama went out to “community organize” against him and against the American people and the nation that elected him because Obama is nothing more than a butthurt malignant narcissist failure.

And this ontological FOOL actually has the tiny little cockroach testicles to claim that somebody ELSE is “unfit” to be president.

Personally, for me, the best argument that Donald Trump will be a great president actually comes in the form of the fact that the very worst president in American history, who just proved he passionately hates this country and everyone who lives in it, says that Trump will be a bad president. Because every single THING Barack Obama believes is profoundly WRONG.

We all know now that Obama has not merely made “ObamaCare” a giant joke, but has in fact jeopardized the entire American health care system.

What many Americans DON’T know – because we’re so busy looking at the colossal train wreck a.k.a. ObamaCare – is that Obama has similarly destroyed several other sectors of the country and the economy.

A fierce battle in New York is the latest sign that populist resistance to the Obama administration-backed Common Core education reforms shows no signs of slowing — and that the opposition isn’t limited to red states.

Since 2010, 45 states have adopted the Common Core benchmarks for proficiency in English and math for schoolchildren at the end of each grade.

Critics say several states are experiencing buyers’ remorse after complaints from parents and scholars that the reforms are untested and poorly designed and put additional burdens on teachers and students. They also say Common Core represents a federal government intrusion into an area traditionally operated at the state and local levels.

Common Core, backed by $4.35 billion offered to states through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus, appeared to be overcoming opposition when it was implemented.

Now, however, backlash has been gaining force. Blogger Michele Zipp of The Stir last week said Common Core “is kind of turning into the Obamacare of education.”

Common Core opponents have organized a social media campaign to make Monday a “National Don’t Send Your Child to School Day” and have planned protests at local education administration buildings. A Facebook page for protesters had more than 5,500 supporters by Sunday.

Opposition to Common Core has been roiling in recent weeks since New York state Education Commissioner John King conducted a series of meetings that highlighted deep concerns about the reforms.

Conservative education scholars have led opposition to Common Core reforms, but the resistance appears to have taken the Obama administration and the education establishment by surprise. The bipartisan National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have led state-by-state adoption of the standards.

“Development of these standards was not driven by the federal government, but by the states,” wrote Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Governors on both sides of the aisle, the business community, and most importantly educators, came together to ensure one thing: that students learn what they need to live a successful life in a 21st century global economy.”

Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

The four states that have rejected Common Core completely are Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia. Minnesota has accepted the English standards but not the math standards.

But much of the energy in recent months has come from opponents, who include an unusually broad mix of scholars, teachers, parents and state legislators.

In one of the first signs of resistance, the Republican National Committee unexpectedly adopted a resolution opposing Common Core. At its spring meeting, the RNC called Common Core an “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘normal.’”

Under pressure from parents, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, sent a letter last month informing Education Secretary Arne Duncan that his state was leaving Common Core, citing a “federal intrusion in education policy.”

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, also a Republican, signed the Common Core Pause Bill this year to allow deliberation among state agencies until a consensus could be reached on governmental education.

In a move that sparked sharp debate within the American church, a group of 132 respected Catholic scholars and educators released an open letter last week calling on U.S. bishops to block the Common Core standards from being imposed on the Catholic Church’s extensive network of parochial schools.

“We believe that, notwithstanding the good intentions of those who made these decisions, Common Core was approved too hastily and with inadequate consideration of how it would change the character and curriculum of our nation’s Catholic schools ,” the letter said. “In fact, we are convinced that Common Core is so deeply flawed that it should not be adopted by Catholic schools which have yet to approve it, and that those schools which have already endorsed it should seek an orderly withdrawal now.”

Other states, including Alabama, have mixed feelings about Common Core.

“I am adamantly opposed to Common Core, and I hope the Legislature will do something about it,” state Sen. Scott Beason, Gardendale Republican, said last week. “There are some people who would like to avoid it one way or another. But I believe it’s one of the biggest issues facing the Republican Party, and this is a red state.”

Let me slightly rephrase one paragraph:

Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

To:

Although adoption of Mafia Protection was voluntary, local businesses that rejected the racket were considered effectively ineligible for mob protection tied to the mafia’s Buy Our Protection Or We’ll Firebomb Your Store initiative.

The following guest column is by Kelly Kohls. She is president of the Springboro school board and is a member of the Warren County Career Center board. She writes in opposition to the Common Core education standards.

Common Core state standards, as well as the testing called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, are quickly becoming controversial issues in Ohio and around the country. It is not a right or left issue – both ends of the political spectrum have raised concerns.

Teachers are worried the computerization that accompanies Common Core and PARCC assessments will render them irrelevant at worst or be used to justify less pay if teachers are reduced to “coaches” for online curricula.

Folks on the political right view the assessments as a top-down take over of education by the Obama administration and some now refer to it as Obamacore.

Common Core, and the idea that all states should have a common set of national education standards, is nothing new. Common Core is the new name but it is the continuation of the education reform movement that began in the 1960s and brought us Outcome Based Education in the 1990s and Evidence Based Education in the 2000s.

Next came the implementation. To force acceptance of the standards, President Obama and his education director Arne Duncan, worked with Congress to provide over $4 billion in the form of Race to the Top grants. These grants required adoption of Common Core. […]

As the role of the federal government in education has grown, our test scores have fallen and our standing in the world has fallen with it. Ohio is moving in the wrong direction and embracing failure. Our kids deserve better.

The “Republican” governor of Ohio is also defending his decision to fully participate in the ObamaCare fiasco while actual REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS WISELY STAYED OUT OF THE HEALTHCARE ABORTION.

Here’s another one:

Parents applauded and cheered wildly when educator Beth Dimino took on New York Education Commissioner Jonathan King at a heated meeting about Common Core. She gave a powerful description of how the new Common Core test regime amounts to “child abuse”:

New York parents and teachers have been in turmoil over the new Common Core school standards, which have resulted in a 30% drop in student test scores state-wide.

A 30% drop in test scores. And do you want to know how liberals react to this fiasco?

You don’t like the fact that your kid is flunking school under ObamaCare? It’s only because you’re a) white – and therefore racist – and b) an arrogant snob who can’t accept reality for her drooling idiot kid.

You want your kid “edyoocayted”? Vote out Obama.

How else has Obama turned the whole nation into the equivalent of “ObamaCare”???

#2) Try to buy a house, or for those of you whom Obama has impoverished out of ever hoping to buy a house, try to do something else you used to be able to do like get a free checking account:

The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sarcastically known as Dodd-Frankery and Dodd-Frankenstein, was passed into law in response to the financial crisis and recession of 2008. It contains the most drastic changes to financial regulations since the regulatory reform after the Great Depression. Proposed by Obama in 2009 and signed into law in 2010, the Democratic bill was the handiwork of former Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) in the House and former Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in the Senate. It was supposedly going to stop banks from making loans to risky buyers who could not pay them back, reducing foreclosures. It was also supposed to change the rules so banks could no longer receive taxpayer-funded bailouts due to their poor business practices.

It hasn’t worked out the way its Democrat proponents claimed. This is because the people who got us into this mess are the same ones who drafted the law. Dodd-Frank contains more of the same things that precipitated the financial crisis; government meddling in the mortgage business and financial markets. Lobbyists for special interests carved out loopholes, resulting in merely different lists of winners and losers. As one author in U.S. News & World Report observed, “These exemptions are less about protecting unsophisticated borrowers than about protecting the taxpayer-guaranteed business models of favored entities.” Hedge funds and some other firms lost big; they are now required to fill out a 192-page form that has been estimated to cost each firm $100,000-$150,000.

Speaking of winners or losers, most outrageously, Dodd-Frank didn’t bother to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the biggest culprits for handing out mortgages to high-risk borrowers who should never have qualified for them. They received the largest bailouts of all financial institutions in 2008.

The 848-page-long act created numerous new federal agencies. It grossly expanded oversight by federal agencies to non-bank financial institutions and their subsidiaries. It required federal agencies to write 398 new rules in order to put the act’s 1,500 provisions into place. It will cost taxpayers millions to run all the new agencies and enforce the rules, and will hurt economic growth and harm the competitiveness of U.S. firms relative to their foreign counterparts.

Over 14,000 pages later, less than half of the rules have been implemented, and numerous deadlines have been missed. Imagine what would happen to employees in the private sector who repeatedly missed deadlines.

The Economist speculated that “the harm done by the massive cost and complexity of its regulations, and the effects of its internal inconsistencies, will outweigh what good may yet come from it.” Even more disturbing, “Officials are being given the power to regulate more intrusively and to make arbitrary or capricious rulings.”

Dodd-Frank came down hard on loan officers and mortgage brokers. Many mortgage brokers are expected to go out of business next year. All loan originators must now be qualified, licensed, registered, and issued a unique identifier. They are restricted from charging more than a three percent fee for all loan origination costs, which is hampering the ability of banks to offer mortgages on homes priced between $100,000 and $160,000. Many may simply shut out this working-class market.

While it superficially sounds good to impose stringent requirements and qualifications in order for borrowers to qualify for mortgages, the one-size-fits-all model really doesn’t fit everyone, and is resulting in investors gobbling up home sales, since fewer average Americans now qualify. According to real estate guru Martin Andelman, since 2009, cash sales to investors represent a third of all sales, and in some areas are responsible for up to 60 percent of all real estate transactions. This will wreak havoc on the economy when the investors all inevitably rush to start dumping houses in the future.

Homeowners are paying more for mortgages because of all the new restrictions and requirements. The regulations simply embolden lenders to work around them, working within “safe harbors” and loopholes to engage in alternative forms of risky lending. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans are exempt from the new regulations, as are timeshare loans, due to stellar lobbyists. So the Dodd-Frank cap on debt-to-income-ratio of 43 percent won’t apply to the riskiest of all loans.

The home vacancy rate is fairly high, over 10 percent, and home values have started dropping again. Around 25 to 50 percent of mortgages are still underwater. Andelman doesn’t see any decrease in foreclosures in the future. He reports that three quarters of the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and only about the top one percent have significant savings.

Banks are passing the costs of Dodd-Frank on to consumers. Dodd-Frank arbitrarily cut down on some bank fees, resulting in the banks diverting costs to customers in other ways. Since Dodd-Frank cracked down on banks charging debit card fees, the banks turned around and started eliminating free checking accounts.

Bank bailouts are still authorized, with certain banks designated as “systemically important financial institutions,” code words for too big to fail. Even worse, the government is then authorized to essentially take over the institution. Sadly, bankers don’t dare criticize Dodd-Frank publicly, or they run the risk of retaliation by the regulators.

Dodd-Frank looks a lot like campaign finance reform; lobbyist-influenced changes being made to a system that pick winners and losers, perpetuating the problem as players find ways around the regulations. It fails to address the principal causes of the 2008 meltdown: The banks made risky loans, knowing the government would bail them out once the loans went south, then sold them to murky institutions on Wall Street where they sometimes became untraceable. These derivatives were driven by a combination of Wall Street banks and politicians. Until the government stops bailing out these kinds of practices, the banks have no incentive to change their risky behavior. Dodd-Frank must be repealed.

The mainstream media has covered the fact that average Americans have largely been shut out of buying homes as investors swoop in and buy up houses. I quote an LA Times “news” piece titled in the physical paper “Investors moving to new turf” by Alejandro Lazo and appearing in the Business section on page B-1 on September 13, 2013. As is so often the case, the liberal snot rag has purged this article – but I still have the physical copy of the article:

Just last year, policymakers turned to real estate investors to rescue the housing market.

Fearing the foreclosure crisis could drag on for years, the Federal Reserve advocated renting out foreclosed homes as a market-based solution. Government-controlled mortgage titan Fannie Mae experimented with selling big pools of them to deep-pocketed buyers.

Few realized then that investors would respond with overwhelming force: Big and small players have injected billions into the market, racing one another to buy up foreclosed homes in post-crash markets. Wall Street launched a sophisticated industry based on buying and renting out homes in bulk. The suburbs of Southern California, Arizona and Nevada saw a virtual land run, creating frenzied demand that has pushed up prices more than 20% in a year.

Now the foreclosed homes in those marketsare almost gone — yet investors have kept buying, competing with individual buyers in standard sales.

The number of so-called absentee buyers, usually cash investors, has dropped slightly in Southern California since hitting a record in January. But they still account for more than 1 in 4 home purchases in the region. And just 8% of those deals were on foreclosed homes in June, compared with 25% a year earlier and a peak of 55% in February 2009.

That’s what’s going on BECAUSE OF DODD-FRANK. And oh, look, THERE’S FANNIE MAE AGAIN AT THE EPICENTER OF YET ANOTHER FIASCO.

That’s why when I see articles like this from liberal “newspapers,” I KEEP THE DAMN ARTICLES. Because when you’ve got a Big Brother like Obama, you’ve got a Ministry of Truth situation like in the novel 1984. And “stories” become “unstories.”

But again, that initial story that the Los Angeles Times in its ubersocialsm purged nevertheless failed to mention that this was because of OBAMA and HIS BIG GOVERNMENT meddling.

And that’s #3) the lowest labor participation rate since Jimmy Carter last tried to destroy America with socialism back in 1978. And just try to get a full-time job today thanks to ObamaCare hell.

We’re either going to vote out Obama and every Democrat in America, or we’re going to learn to become content with less health care for more money, less education for our children – again, for more money – and a middle class permanently frozen out of every being able to buy a home and participate in the American Dream. And over everything, fewer and fewer Americans working at all, and working part time because employers can’t afford to hire them due to ObamaCare and myriad other Obama regulations.

Frank: “well one of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that. I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with home ownership. I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing, my efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that. The goal is for people to have decent housing and I think beginning in the Clinton administration, exacerbated by Bush, we pushed people too much into home ownership…”
– Barney Frank, May 20, ‘2010 on CNBC.

And here’s Frank from 2005 documenting the fact that Barney Frank in 2010 is a rank liar:

“This is a very important resolution, particularly at this time, because we have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy.
Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership, homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we have seen elsewhere.

This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality and people building fiber-optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level,but you will not see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.

So those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for home ownership.
– Barney Frank, 2005

You’re right, Barney. It wasn’t the Dot-com situation. It was a hundred times WORSE than the Dot-com situation, even given as bad as the Dot-com bubble was. And yeah, you sure were right when you said there wouldn’t be a collapse, weren’t you?

So first of all, we have Barney Frank – liberal Democrat par excellence – acknowledging that the bad policy that led to the mortgage market meltdown was actually a CLINTON policy that Bush merely continued (most likely because he knew he’d be called a “racist” the moment he ended a program that gave billions of dollars to minorities to buy homes they couldn’t afford).

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

It’s beyond asinine that Democrats blame Bush for ruining the economy, and praise Clinton as having the mostest wonderfulest economy ever, when it was a Clinton program that ruined the Bush economy. But that’s the mainstream media narrative for you.

So Barney Frank reminds us that the destruction of the Bush economy was bookended by massive Clinton failures – the Dot-com bubble collapse in 2001 and the housing market bubble collapse in 2008. And Clinton was never blamed for either of them by the propagandist mainstream media.

The second thing you can notice is that Democrats like Barney Frank – who were so quick to pounce all over the mortgage meltdown and blame Bush for it – were not only the ones who created the problem, but were the ones who defended the problem.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

So Bush WANTED to regulate, in contradiction to all the lies that you heard.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Slimes? A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market wold explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe? From a Clinton program?

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, acting as Government sponsored enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased. What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, an intelligent observer would note a conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency. What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them. This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what has allowed toxic instruments that have been sold across the world. It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments. This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’. And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

And thus you had a financial disaster created by one William Jefferson Clinton and one Democrat Party. And now a second act of economic destruction is being planned by Barack Obama.

The 2008 economic collapse that Democrats were elected to fix was itself created by Democrats who will now continue the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.

Democrats then demonized Bush for merely being there when the disaster happened. When they had created the mess, and when they had refused to allow Bush to do anything to prevent a Democrat-created disaster that he and other Republicans saw coming, but ultimately lacked the courage to stop.

When I hear “maximum eligible participation in all government programs,” I think “Cloward-Piven strategy” (and see also here) and the intentional destruction of our economic system. Social radicals want to overload the system with too many “clients” and too many people getting benefits so that when the system collapses under the weight of all of those subsidies and benefits they will be able to create “change.”